Friday, February 19, 2010

Hunting 22 PagesThis is the center piece of this release 22 pages of hunting. They are through in covering all the techniques including trapping, ambush hunting, tracking, and capturing. Plus what exactly what you earn from doing this. And it wraps up with a bunch of adventures seeds.

A big improvement over the original and the nice is that pretty much you pick what you are hunting so not more sending your players after a cow!

The Drunken Hake 6 pagesThis is an inn in the Orbaal (think viking) castle village of Arathal. It is a potential jumping off point for Sealing expedition to the Afarezir islands to the west. Note that the Hake is a type of fish.

Seals 10 pagesThis is ten pages on Seals and what one can expect in the way of hunting them. This last Harn release has an article on the Afarezirs where sealing is a major way of life. It not as mundane as it sounds as some of these guys can put up a quite a fight. Coupled with the fact the many of the prime sealing grounds are hazardous locations in their own right can make for quite an adventure.

Irreproachable Order 10 PagesDue to various reason this was supposed to be a general article on game animals. But some last minute problems were spotted and it was pulled in favor of an article on the Irreproachable Order of the Goddess Peoni.

This is about the male only order. The church of Peoni believes in celibacy and has sex segregated order that are otherwise equal. This includes useful details for roleplaying members of this order. Of particular interest is a mention of a more militant version of Peonism in western Harn developing in reaction to the Agrikism (think Set). Another are the two congregations which are sub orders. The Sons of Tirrala or Tirralmen are battlefield medics, despite the pacifism inherent in being priests of Peoni they have a hard core attitude that interesting. The Shield of Belsirasin or Shieldmen deal with illnesses of the mind and body. There is a cool picture showing one of them dealing with a demon.

Overall all of this is through and well done. Put it is a bit pricey especially buying the individual articles. The detail can be overwhelming but it is written with the idea of using it in an adventure. There is some good stuff to cherry pick for your campaign whether you are using Harn, Harnmaster, or something else.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.